The Best and the Brightest

The Vietnam War was the only war in American History that really interest me, enough to go and fight. Never was able to make it due to auto accident, but I sure followed it closely via TV and mass media. This book was a good early history piece to have in better understanding the war.

Nothing so brilliantly crystallized and clarified the epic true story of how the American people were led into the tragedy of Vietnam better than did this classic book by David Halberstam. Already famous for his journalistic overview in "The Making of a Quagmire", Halberstam riveted the nation with his absorbing, literate, and very detailed account of how the arrogant, insular, technocratically well educated, and affluent sons and daughters of the Power Elite in this country led us into the unholy miasma of Vietnam. This is a classic story superbly told by a journalist with impeccable credentials. Halberstam already had a wealth of personal experience as a correspondent in Vietnam before initiating the research for this book, and he draws a number of fascinating, intimate, and quite absorbing in-depth portraits of the major figures involved in this fool's errand formerly referred to as French Indochina. From the feckless and perhaps clueless Robert McNamara to McGeorge Bundy, brother William Bundy, former Oxford Scholar Dean Rusk, George Ball, William Westmoreland, Maxwell Taylor, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, all these alumni of the best schools and best families (with the single exception of LBJ, an accidental president) pranced their pseudo-macho way toward the single most disastrous series of military decisions this side of Pearl Harbor. Unlike those of us who actually saw the jungles of Vietnam up close and personal, these men were neither ignorant, nor provincial (at least not in the ordinary use of that term), nor poorly informed; rather, they both considered themselves and were considered by others to be the most outstanding, capable, and effective members of the contemporary "Power Elite" i.e. the best of the then contemporary ivy League graduates Kennedy could lure from the bastions of the academic, business, and corporate world into the magic and presumptuous world of Camelot. In essence, these guys were seen as the best and the brightest of their generation. Just how their elite educations, presumptuous world-views, and de-facto actual ignorance and lack of what we would now refer to as "street-smarts" led them to conclude it was in the nation's interests to fight what others have called "the wrong war in the wrong place with the wrong foes at the wrong time" is an epic tale of arrogance, insular thinking, and mutually sustained delusions. Through their efforts they embroiled us in an unwinnable war, a conflict that the rest of us paid so dearly for in blood, sweat and tears. They led a nation then so singularly blessed with affluence and peace into a bottomless cauldron of dissent, inter-generational strife, and almost pitched us off the precipice of social and political revolution. It is important to better understand what kind of men they were, and why they led us so carelessly into such sustained disaster. Why did they react to defeats by escalating, even when the evidence clearly in

This is a truly excellent book on American policy making in Vietnam. I first read it in 1973 or 1974. It blew my mind that 'the best and the brightest' could act as they did, whether from honest but gross misjudgments to outright lies, most often bound with incredible arrogance. Some of the material is found in the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's own study of the war. Another reviewer commented that they had not yet been published, but Halberstam, ace that he was, apparently had access to them. This book provided another, and large, nail in the coffin of my naive idealism of someone growing up in post WWII America (college, class of 1966) with respect to the US government. I was totally absorbed when reading it. Halberstam does occasionally overuse some of his pet phrasings,e.g. 'rare ability'.

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest is the Iliad of America's doomed involvement in Vietnam, a book of audacious scope and intense human drama. Want to know why America became enmired in Vietnam, and why we lost? One could argue that there isn't a more important question to ask about any aspect of American history in the last 30 years, and Halberstam answers it as fully as it can be answered in a single narrative. Reading this book thirty years after it was published, one can't help but be struck by the extent to which Halberstam's version of events has become THE standard account; his argument is thorough, and thoroughly damning, and it is a difficult one to refute. Halberstam succeeds utterly in making palpable the forces that acted on the collection of flawed individuals who found themselves in the White House during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a cast of characters brought to life with novelistic virtuosity. To coin a cliche, if you're only going to read one Vietnam book, this is surely it